| date | version |
|---|---|
| 1993-07-?? | 1.0 |
| 1996-10-?? | 2.0 |
| 1997-05-?? | 3.0 |
| 2000-07-?? | 4.0 |
| 2002-05-21 | 5.0 |
| 2005-09-07 | 6.0 |
| 2007-12-30 | 7.0 |
| 2011-12-21 | 8.0 |
| 2014-03-03 | 9.0 |
| 2014-12-03 | 9.05 |
It's been a long time coming, and it's official now; Wholly Genes has retired The Master Genealogist (TMG).
The last major release of The Master Genealogist is TMG 9.
It was introduced early this year.
The last, final version of TMG is TMG 9.05, released on 2014 December 2.
The major version number increase from 8 to 9 set users up for a disappointment. TMG 9 does not offer any major new features, there is only a modest list of minor improvement.
That disappointing TMG 9 release follows on TMG 8, which is really TMG 7 Service Pack 1. TMG 8 was about making sure TMG runs fine on Win32. The main feature of TMG 8 is that it fixes problems TMG 7 users have with the report engine on Windows 7 64-bit. Wholly Genes still charged more for major upgrades than many other vendors charge for an entirely new license, so TMG users were more than a little miffed that Wholly Genes decided to charge them for what is essentially a bug fix release.
On 2014 Jul 29, Bob Velke announced that he would discontinue TMG. Wholly did not send out a press release, Bob Velke merely posted an announcement on the Wholly Genes forum. The announcement lays out a timetable; sales would continue throughout September 2014, official support ends 2014 December 31, after which the forum remains available for user-to-user support.
This is how a product should be discontinued; clearly communicate what's going to happen.
Wholly Genes deserves kudos for announcing the retirement of TMG before they stopped offering and supporting it.
In comparison, it was more than ten (!) years after they had abandoned PAF already
that FamilySearch disingenuously announced
discontinuation of that product -
and for most that time, they brazenly kept promoting it on their home page!
Wholly handled things considerably more professional than FamilySearch.
The back story to TMG's discontinuation is one of stubborn technological obsolescence.
The back story to TMG's discontinuation is one of stubborn technological obsolescence.
TMG is written in FoxPro, a programming environment aimed at dBase power users that was very popular in the 80s.
Microsoft acquired FoxPro in 1992.
FoxPro version 9.0, released in 2004 and last updated in 2007, is the final version.
Back in 2007, The Effect of FoxPro’s Death on Genealogy pointed out that vendors of FoxPro-based products had tree basic options:
quit the business, stick with FoxPro, or migrate to a new platform.
Even after Microsoft abandoned FoxPro, Wholly Genes decided to stick with this legacy platform and all its limitations.
TMG has never supported GEDCOM 5.5.1, and not even fully supported GEDCOM 5.5, because FoxPro is a pre-Unicode product,
and while FoxPro's database capabilities may have seemed royal in the 1990s, genealogy databases are not getting smaller.
It is common for vendors to revitalise aging products by completely rebuilding them once in while, for many good reasons.
For more than two decades, Wholly Genes has refused to do so, and that shows.
TMG 9 is a genealogy product with database limitations and a user interface design stuck in the 1990s.
That messy user interface has become infamous, yet Wholly Genes kept unwilling to admit that TMG needed an overhaul.
Wholly Genes remained in denial until the bitter end, desperately trying to sell TMG's user interface mess as a learning curve
,
as if a cumbersome learning curve makes the interface any better - that's WordPerfect-think from the 1990s.
To keep up with the competition, Wholly Genes developers should have
rethought TMG and rebuild it on another platform with modern capabilities,
but it seems they never bothered to learn or even evaluate other platforms; Wholly Genes stubbornly stuck with FoxPro,
and became more and more invested in their outdated design until only their most loyal users had not left them yet.
It is because of the outdated technology that TMG 7 did not run well on Win32,
and because of the increasing complexities of and overburdened aging design that Wholly Genes found it near impossible to introduce major new features.
TMG's GEDCOM export was deliberately crippled, but it wasn't a straightforward case of vendor lock-in.
The announcement is written like a press release,
and not lacking in the usual but delusional self-aggrandising superlatives that press releases tend to contain.
According to this announcement, TMG is unmatched
, has pushed the boundaries
and encouraged users to expect more from their family tree software
- and all that
in the announcement that has to admit they're calling it quits because of dwindling sales.
Wholly Genes loved to call TMG the one program that does it all
, although that is something TMG has never been.
In fact, many TMG users bought the third-party product Second Site precisely because producing passable web output was something TMG 1 through 7 did not do.
The harsh truth is that no version of TMG has ever met the lowest bar for genealogy software; the ability to get your data in and out again.
You can not get all names and text in because even TMG 9 does not support Unicode,
and you could not get your data out, because TMG's GEDCOM export did not include all data fields.
A particular persistent complaint has been that TMG supports witnesses,
but that users who took advantage of that feature found that TMG will not export those witnesses to TMG GEDCOM files.
It is the one-but latest version, TMG 9.04, released on 2014 September 24, which finally fixed that issue.
TMG's GEDCOM export was deliberately crippled, but it wasn't a straightforward case of vendor lock-in.
When asked about exporting witnesses, Bob Velke would claim that GEDCOM does not allow export of witnesses,
immediately segueing into a spiel about how GenBridge is superior
to GEDCOM, in an attempt to sell GenBridge licenses to other vendors.
Wholly Genes sold TMG to end users, and GenBridge to other vendors.
GenBridge is not really a separate product, but a fancy name for TMG's import module,
licensed as a component for other vendors to use.
A vendor that licenses GenBridge becomes dependent on and has to pay fees to a competitor, so major vendors laughed the idea of. For years, only a few small vendors of genealogy utilities, small vendors that liked the idea of supporting direct import from several genealogy database formats, but simply did not have the resources to develop that functionality themselves, took a license. So, all the big vendors did their own thing, a few small vendors licensed it, and both decisions made sense.
GenBridge is as dated as TMG; many of the products it supports were discontinued so long ago, that you may not even have heard of them.
Choosing to license GenBridge has always been a poor's man choice.
GenBridge is slow and has the same limitations as the TMG program it comes from, most notably its lack of Unicode support.
As the genealogy software world matured, vendors adopted Unicode and left code pages behind.
As the years went by, GenBridge was looking more and more dated,
and not only because of its lack of Unicode support, but for its lack of support for major new genealogy database formats.
GenBridge is as dated as TMG; many of the products it supports were discontinued so long ago, that you may not even have heard of them.
The list of genealogy database formats supported by GenBridge is a blast from the past.
That GenBridge supports the database formats of applications that have long been abandoned,
such Family Gathering, Family Origins, Generations, Roots IV, Roots V, Visual Roots and Ultimate Family Tree is nice.
That it cannot import the database formats of Ancestral Quest or RootsMagic is not so nice.
That it claims to support PAF 5, but does not really support PAF 5, because PAF is Unicode-based and the import isn't Unicode-capable, isn't so nice either.
In 2007, just as GenBridge seemed about to die the natural death of low-quality dated software, it had a brief revival, for which Ancestry.com is to blame. Ancestry.com had decided to replace Family Tree Maker Classic with New Family Tree Maker, but was in hurry to get the product out. They decided to license GenBridge for use in New Family Tree Maker. That this surprising decision wasn't to the detriment of New Family Tree Maker is because New Family Tree Maker is incredibly slow, buggy and crash-prone all of itself. GenBridge is used in all existing versions of New Family Tree Maker; from Family Tree Maker 2008 through Family Tree Maker 2014. This dated 16-bit code-page library is even part of Family Tree Maker 2014 64-bit edition, simply because the Family Tree Maker team has become dependent on it. With Ancestry.com licensing GenBridge, it is no surprise that GenBridge was updated to support New Family Tree Maker.
MyHeritage is setting its own course now, but for years, MyHeritage was a me-too company, copying other companies, most notably Ancestry.com. Mid 2011, MyHeritage released Family Tree Builder 5.1, which suddenly supported direct import from several competing formats, thanks to GenBridge. Interestingly, MyHeritage did not opt for all legacy file formats that GenBridge supports, but only the less dated ones. The latest version of MyHeritage Family Tree Builder, Family Tree Builder 7.0, still relies on GenBridge.
GenBridge is a part of TMG, and TMG development has terminated. It is not very hard for Wholly Genes to support GenBridge, a small part of TMG, a bit longer than the entire program, and I do not doubt that they have to, because Ancestry.com and MyHeritage have some demands regarding support. However, in the long run, both companies will want to be independent of Wholly Genes, have completely Unicode-based applications, will want Unicode-capable direct import so their PAF import really supports PAF, and want to add direct import from today's major competitors, such as Ancestral Quest and RootsMagic.
It is reasonable to expect, now that Wholly Genes is abandoning development of GenBridge, that most third-party vendors using GenBridge will start looking for another solution, such as improving their third-party GEDCOM support. The retirement of TMG and its GenBridge module sounds like an ideal opportunity for AncestorSync, a promising product announced in 2011, but AncestorSync is no longer being developed.
The TMG retirement announcement states that Wholly Genes is making GenBridge freely available for third parties who wish to import from TMG. That is a nice gesture, but most parties will be better off making their own import routine, to directly import from TMG, instead of going through unsupported legacy software to do so.
Until TMG version 8, TMG's web output was not just poor, but positively atrocious, and that's why many TMG users use Second Site.
Second Site was created by John Cardinal to be the web site generator that TMG should have included.
Second Site not only provides much better output than TMG.
As a TMG-specific add-on product, Second Site reads TMG databases directly.
Shortly after the announcement that TMG would be discontinued,
John Cardinal announced that Second Site would not be discontinued,
and that he would consider upgrading it with GEDCOM support,
so that future versions can be used with practically every genealogy application.
I know that he has been working on this possibility,
as he did not just comment on some GEDCOM articles of mine,
but even found an omission in GEDCOM date phrases.
It is no longer possible to buy TMG licenses or major upgrades.
Bob Velke can be faulted for never rethinking & rebuilding,
but as he wound the TMG business down, he seems to have done practically everything right.
First of all, he announced his decision with a timetable.
Secondly, he finally published the TMG file format again.
He more than once claimed that Wholly Genes published TMG's file format, but that was a partial true;
he had published the file format for TMG version 3, and not for any version since.
Thirdly, several days before the announcement, he published the TMG 9 file format.
Fourthly, within his announcement, he promised to make GenBridge freely available.
Last but not least, the final versions of TMG, 9.04 and 9.05, finally do export witnesses to GEDCOM.
It is no longer possible to buy TMG licenses or major upgrades. Full installers and patches remain available through the Upgrade Centre. These default to 30-days trial editions, you'll need to enter your license key to continue using TMG.
Some users have suggested that TMG be open-sourced. There have been no announcements regarding this from Wholly Genes.
Last year, when FamilySearch finally admitted that they had abandoned PAF,
several vendors sprung into action to capture users leaving PAF behind, by offering special upgrades.
The response to Wholly Genes's announcement is more muted,
simply because TMG was never near as popular as PAF still is,
but several vendors took action to try and win former TMG users over.
I doubt vendors will experience a noticeable uptick in sales from TMG users seeking for a new product. TMG was never as popular as PAF, and its popularity has been in a steady decline for years. Most TMG users already switched to a more modern alternative, and the hold-outs are likely to keep using TMG for as long as it keeps working on the latest Windows version - or until they see what modern features they've been missing out on all these years.
WitnessTMG is a new utility, created by Crestline Enterprises, creators of webGED Progenitor. It creates the witness entries that are missing from TMG GEDCOM files. Now that TMG 9.04 and 9.05 do export witnesses, this utility seems superfluous, I mention it for completeness' sake.
Calico Pie's Family Historian has long supported direct import from TMG.
Following the announcement, Calico Pie created a FAQ for TMG users.
Family Historian 5 did not support witnesses yet,
but Family Historian 6, released 2014 Dec 9, does.
RootsMagic took advantage of the TMG file format documentation to add direct TMG import to RootsMagic 6.3.3 and later,
published a brief Moving Data from TMG to RootsMagic guide,
created a special RootsMagic for TMG users landing page,
even registered the domain tmgupgrade.com, which redirects to that TMG user landing page.
Cocolsoft, the makers of GENP, issued a press release to highlight its support for import of TMG GEDCOM files, and the cross trade they offer to TMG users.
Millennia, the makers of Legacy Family Tree, announced their intention to support direct import from TMG in an upcoming version on 2014 September 22. The version supporting direct TMG import has not been released yet.
Be aware that switching from TMG to Legacy is hardly an upgrade, and more like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Legacy Family Tree is the last well-known genealogy application that still doesn't support Unicode.
TMG has been retired in orderly fashion.
Full installers and patches remain available.
Second Site has not been retired and will possible be upgraded with GEDCOM support.
GenBridge was as dated TMG and has been retired with TMG.
GenBridge has gone free, but vendors still using should be exploring alternatives already.
The TMG 9 database format has been published, and third parties have already taken advantage of this to offer direct TMG import.
Several vendors are promoting their ability to import TMG databases.
Back in the 1990s, TMG was a pretty good genealogy application. TMG remained stuck in the 1990s, and had to be discontinued because it had become seriously outdated, but it did have a good run and outlasted many other genealogy applications available in the 1990s.
TMG's update history off the top of my head
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.